Wk 3 Assignment
For your Week Three assignment, you will write a two and a half page draft
(excluding the title and references page) of your Week Five Literary
Analysis. Be sure to review Part B upon completion of Part A. The draft
should contain a working thesis (which you wrote in the Week One
assignment), an introduction, at least three body paragraphs, and a
conclusion. Be sure to include some paraphrases and quotations of the
reference material in your Week Two Annotated Bibliography. You should
use your research to help you develop and support the thesis.
• Copy and paste the writing prompt you chose to explore in Week One at
the beginning of your draft (this will help your instructor see if you
focused well on the prompt).
• Restate your working thesis after the copy-and-paste prompt.
• Develop your working thesis based on the feedback you have received.
Again, the thesis should offer a debatable claim in response to one of
the prompts on the list.
• Analyze the literary work from the approved list of prompts chosen in
Week One that pertained to your selected topic and include the three
key ideas developed in the Week One Proposal.
• Focus on one primary text.
• Include references from at least two secondary sources identified on your
Week Two Annotated Bibliography. More sources are not necessarily
better.
• Apply your knowledge of literary elements and other concepts in your
response to the prompt. Reference the List of Literary Techniques.
• Avoid any use of the first person.
Do not summarize the plot.
Writing Prompt #3
Consider the role of setting, or context, in one of the works. For example, a
story that takes place in a wild and natural setting might include characters
struggling against nature to survive. A story set in a city might include
themes of alienation and anonymity because of the impersonal crowds and
busy city life. Cultural contexts can combine with both urban and rural
elements to produce further meaning, as well. Consider the following
questions as you critically read one of the texts below: Does the protagonist
conflict with the setting or have particular interactions with it? Does the
protagonist’s relationship with the setting connect with his/her development
as a character? Does the setting reveal other themes and conflicts?
"The Things They Carried" (O'Brien, 1990) - 5.4 in Journey into Literature
Guiding Questions
• How does the story communicate the uncertain and frightening setting
these soldier-characters experience? (Consider repeated phrases or
other devices.)
• What sorts of emotions, such as stress or fear, does the Vietnam context
cause the characters to experience? Give specific examples from the
story, and consider how these emotions might be “told” to us in
multiple ways.
How do the soldiers in the story cope with their setting/context, whether
through imagined escapes or other means, and are they successful?
Running Head: ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Annotated Bibliography
How Setting in “The Things They Carried” Enhanced Trauma to the Soldiers
Jasmine Barbusca
ENG125: Introduction to Literature
Instructor: Melinda McGuire
May 30, 2017
1
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
2
Prompt
#3: Consider the role of setting, or context, in one of the works.
Working Thesis
In the story “The things they carried” the person and other characters are faced by hardships due
to the battlefield setting embraced by the author. This causes fear, anger and other extreme
emotions, strong enough to cause trauma.
Annotation
O'brien, T. (2009). The things they carried. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
The Novel is written to describe war. The major events include the departure of the
soldiers. The things they carried depended on the mission, and on the departure, the
author mentions that they carried the atmosphere and the sky among other things at
departure from their country. It implies that they left the general environment tensed. In
the battle field they go through difficult times that are very traumatizing, and they are
alienated from the people they love; Lt Jimmy is a victim of such circumstances. Their
raid in the village Than Khe was one where Lt Jimmy and his men were very ruthless,
even shooting chicken. They even experienced their peers die. This source is the main
source that will be the most suitable sources in supporting the thesis statement.
Talbott, J. (1996). Combat Trauma in the American Civil War. History Today, 46(3), 41.
Considering the fact that Tim Obrien’s work is focused on the civil war, Talbott’s work is
instrumental in proving trauma because it is focused on the same topic and also describes
the situation from Tim O’Brien’s Perspective. His conclusion is that “ In terms of the
terrible pressures they endured, combat soldiers of the last year of the Civil War had
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
3
more in common with those of the first year of the Great War than either had with
civilians of their own times. In terms of mental disorder, the so-called `Front Experience'
reached not only between belligerents but across generations.” (Talbott, 1996).
Wesley, M. (2002). Truth and Fiction in Tim O'Brien's" If I Die in a Combat Zone" and"
The Things They Carried". College Literature, 29(2), 1-18.
Wesley analyzes several war stories that have been designed by ex-militants. In his
description he mentions that the writers who have been in a real battlefield have the
element of trying to embrace authenticity in their writing. He describes that Tim O’Brien
was one of the authentic writers, but there is some fiction. He, however, mentions that
verisimilitude has no inherent values. This implies that some of the work could appear to
be true or very real, but it is written to enhance the literature work through additional of
unnoticeable fiction. This is an essential source because the thesis seems to be focusing
on a health issue that needs to be based on true information.
The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien (1990)
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount
Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was
hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon,
after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the
letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of fight pretending. He
would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He
would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than
anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty,
elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major
at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and
midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf.
She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take
care of yourself. The letters weighed ten ounces. They were signed "Love, Martha," but
Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he
sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his
rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the
perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if
Martha was a virgin.
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or
near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wrist watches, dog tags,
mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid,
lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations,1 and two or three
canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between fifteen and twenty pounds,
depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man,
carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound
cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and
several hotel-size bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R2 in Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavender, who
was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than
Khe3 in mid-April. By necessity, and because it was SOP,4 they all carried steel helmets that
weighed five pounds including the liner and camouflage cover. They carried the standard
fatigue jackets and trousers. Very few carried underwear. On their feet they carried jungle
boots—2.1 pounds—and Dave Jensen carried three pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholl's
foot powder as a precaution against trench foot. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six
or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the
RTO,5 carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books.
Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to
him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge
against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the white man,
his grandfather's old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated. Because the land was mined and
booby-trapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket,
which weighed 6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you could
die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet
band for easy access. Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet,
each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or
makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was
worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his
poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper
that took him away.
They were called legs or grunts.
To carry something was to "hump" it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for
Martha up the hills and through the swamps. In its intransitive form, to hump meant to
walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.
Almost everyone humped photographs. In his wallet, Lieutenant Cross carried two
photographs of Martha. The first was a Kodachrome snapshot signed "Love," though he
knew better. She stood against a brick wall. Her eyes were gray and neutral, her lips slightly
open as she stared straight-on at the camera. At night, sometimes, Lieutenant Cross
wondered who had taken the picture, because he knew she had boyfriends, because he
loved her so much, and because he could see the shadow of the picture taker spreading out
against the brick wall. The second photograph had been clipped from the 1968 Mount
Sebastian yearbook. It was an action shot—women's volleyball—and Martha was bent
horizontal to the floor, reaching, the palms of her hands in sharp focus, the tongue taut, the
expression frank and competitive. There was no visible sweat. She wore white gym shorts.
Her legs, he thought, were almost certainly the legs of a virgin, dry and without hair, the left
knee cocked and carrying her entire weight, which was just over 117 pounds. Lieutenant
Cross remembered touching that left knee. A dark theater, he remembered, and the movie
was Bonnie and Clyde, and Martha wore a tweed skirt, and during the final scene, when he
touched her knee, she turned and looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his
hand back, but he would always remember the feel of the tweed skirt and the knee beneath
it and the sound of the gunfire that killed Bonnie and Clyde, how embarrassing it was, how
slow and oppressive. He remembered kissing her goodnight at the dorm door. Right then, he
thought, he should've done something brave. He should've carried her up the stairs to her
room and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all night long. He should've risked it.
Whenever he looked at the photographs, he thought of new things he should've done.
What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty.
As a first lieutenant and platoon leader, Jimmy Cross carried a compass, maps, code books,
binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol that weighed 2.9 pounds fully loaded. He carried a strobe
light and the responsibility for the lives of his men.
As an RTO, Mitchell Sanders carried the PRC-25 radio, a killer, twenty-six pounds with its
battery.
As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel filled with morphine and plasma and malaria
tablets and surgical tape and comic books and all the things a medic must carry, including
M&M's6 for especially bad wounds, for a total weight of nearly 18 pounds.
As a big man, therefore a machine gunner, Henry Dobbins carried the M-60,7 which weighed
twenty-three pounds unloaded, but which was almost always loaded. In addition, Dobbins
carried between ten and fifteen pounds of ammunition draped in belts across his chest and
shoulders.
As PFCs8 or Spec 4s,9 most of them were common grunts10 and carried the standard M-16
gas-operated assault rifle. The weapon weighed 7.5 pounds unloaded, 8.2 pounds with its
full twenty-round magazine. Depending on numerous factors, such as topography and
psychology, the riflemen carried anywhere from twelve to twenty magazines, usually in
cloth bandoliers, adding on another 8.4 pounds at minimum, fourteen pounds at maximum.
When it was available, they also carried M-16 maintenance gear—rods and steel brushes
and swabs and tubes of LSA oil—all of which weighed about a pound. Among the grunts,
some carried the M-79 grenade launcher, 5.9 pounds unloaded, a reasonably light weapon
except for the ammunition, which was heavy. A single round weighed ten ounces. The
typical load was twenty-five rounds. But Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried thirty-four
rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under an
exceptional burden, more than twenty pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and
helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the
unweighed fear. He was dead weight. There was no twitching or flopping. Kiowa, who saw it
happen, said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something—just boom, then
down—not like the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes
ass over teakettle—not like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom.
Down. Nothing else. It was a bright morning in mid-April. Lieutenant Cross felt the pain. He
blamed himself. They stripped off Lavender's canteens and ammo, all the heavy things, and
Rat Kiley said the obvious, the guy's dead, and Mitchell Sanders used his radio to report one
U.S. KIA11 and to request a chopper. Then they wrapped Lavender in his poncho. They
carried him out to a dry paddy, established security, and sat smoking the dead man's dope
until the chopper came. Lieutenant Cross kept to himself. He pictured Martha's smooth
young face, thinking he loved her more than anything, more than his men, and now Ted
Lavender was dead because he loved her so much and could not stop thinking about her.
When the dust-off arrived, they carried Lavender aboard. Afterward they burned Than Khe.
They marched until dusk, then dug their holes, and that night Kiowa kept explaining how
you had to be there, how fast it was, how the poor guy just dropped like so much concrete.
Boom-down, he said. Like cement.
In addition to the three standard weapons—the M-60, M-16,12 and M-7913—they carried
whatever presented itself, or whatever seemed appropriate as a means of killing or staying
alive. They carried catch-as-catch can. At various times, in various situations, they carried
M-14s14 and CAR-15s15 and Swedish Ks16 and grease guns17 and captured AK-47s18 and
ChiComs19 and RPGs20 and Simonov carbines and black market Uzis21 and .38-caliber
Smith & Wesson handguns and 66 mm LAWs22 and shotguns and silencers and blackjacks
and bayonets and C-4 plastic explosives. Lee Strunk carried a slingshot; a weapon of last
resort, he called it. Mitchell Sanders carried brass knuckles. Kiowa carried his grandfather's
feathered hatchet. Every third or fourth man carried a Claymore antipersonnel mine23—3.5
pounds with its firing device. They all carried fragmentation grenades—fourteen ounces
each. They all carried at least one M-18 colored smoke grenade—twenty-four ounces. Some
carried CS or tear-gas24 grenades. Sonic carried white-phosphorus grenades. They carried
all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things
they carried.
In the first week of April, before Lavender died, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross received a goodluck charm from Martha. It was a simple pebble. An ounce at most. Smooth to the touch, it
was a milky-white color with flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a miniature egg.
In the accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey
shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together
but also separated. It was this separate-but-together quality, she wrote, that had inspired
her to pick up the pebble and to carry it in her breast pocket for several days, where it
seemed weightless, and then to send it through the mail, by air, as a token of her truest
feelings for him. Lieutenant Cross found this romantic. But he wondered what her truest
feelings were, exactly, and what she meant by separate-but-together. He wondered how the
tides and waves had come into play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline when
Martha saw the pebble and bent down to rescue it from geology. He imagined bare feet.
Martha was a poet, with the poet's sensibilities, and her feet would be brown and bare, the
toenails unpainted, the eyes chilly and somber like the ocean in March, and though it was
painful, he wondered who had been with her that afternoon. He imagined a pair of shadows
moving along the strip of sand where things came together but also separated. It was
phantom jealousy, he knew, but he couldn't help himself. He loved her so much. On the
march, through the hot days of early April, he carried the pebble in his mouth, turning it
with his tongue, tasting sea salts and moisture. His mind wandered. He had difficulty
keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the
column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just
pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing. He
would feel himself rising. Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness.
What they carried varied by mission.
When a mission took them to the mountains, they carried mosquito netting, machetes,
canvas tarps, and extra bug juice.
If a mission seemed especially hazardous, or if it involved a place they knew to be bad, they
carried everything they could. In certain heavily mined AOs,25 where the land was dense
with Toe Poppers and Bouncing Betties, they took turns humping a twenty-eight-pound
mine detector. With its headphones and big sensing plate, the equipment was a stress on the
lower back and shoulders, awkward to handle, often useless because of the shrapnel in the
earth, but they carried it anyway, partly for safety, partly for the illusion of safety.
On ambush, or other night missions, they carried peculiar little odds and ends. Kiowa
always took along his New Testament and a pair of moccasins for silence. Dave Jensen
carried night-sight vitamins high in carotene. Lee Strunk carried his slingshot; ammo, he
claimed, would never be a problem. Rat Kiley carried brandy and M&M's candy. Until he was
shot, Ted Lavender carried the starlight scope, which weighed 63 pounds with its aluminum
carrying case. Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriend's pantyhose wrapped around his neck as
a comforter. They all carried ghosts. When dark came, they would move out single file
across the meadows and paddies to their ambush coordinates, where they would quietly set
up the Claymores and lie down and spend the night waiting.
Other missions were more complicated and required special equipment. In mid-April, it was
their mission to search out and destroy the elaborate tunnel complexes in the Than Khe area
south of Chu Lai. To blow the tunnels, they carried one-pound blocks of pentrite high
explosives, four blocks to a man, sixty-eight pounds in all. They carried wiring, detonators,
and battery-powered clackers. Dave Jensen carried earplugs. Most often, before blowing the
tunnels, they were ordered by higher command to search them, which was considered bad
news, but by and large they just shrugged and carried out orders. Because he was a big man,
Henry Dobbins was excused from tunnel duty. The others would draw numbers. Before
Lavender died there were seventeen men in the platoon, and whoever drew the number
seventeen would strip off his gear and crawl in headfirst with a flashlight and Lieutenant
Cross's .45-caliber pistol. The rest of them would fan out as security. They would sit down or
kneel, not facing the hole, listening to the ground beneath them, imagining cobwebs and
ghosts, whatever was down there—the tunnel walls squeezing in—how the flashlight
seemed impossibly heavy in the hand and how it was tunnel vision in the very strictest
sense, compression in all ways, even time, and how you had to wiggle in—ass and elbows—
a swallowed-up feeling—and how you found yourself worrying about odd things—will your
flashlight go dead? Do rats carry rabies? If you screamed, how far would the sound carry?
Would your buddies hear it? Would they have the courage to drag you out? In some
respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a
killer.
On April 16, when Lee Strunk drew the number seventeen, he laughed and muttered
something and went down quickly. The morning was hot and very still. Not good, Kiowa
said. He looked at the tunnel opening, then out across a dry paddy toward the village of
Than Khe. Nothing moved. No clouds or birds or people. As they waited, the men smoked
and drank Kool-Aid, not talking much, feeling sympathy for Lee Strunk but also feeling the
luck of the draw. You win some, you lose some, said Mitchell Sanders, and sometimes you
settle for a rain check. It was a tired line and no one laughed.
Henry Dobbins ate a tropical chocolate bar. Ted Lavender popped a tranquilizer and went
off to pee. After five minutes, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross moved to the tunnel, leaned down,
and examined the darkness. Trouble, he thought—a cave-in maybe. And then suddenly,
without willing it, he was thinking about Martha. The stresses and fractures, the quick
collapse, the two of them buried alive under all that weight. Dense, crushing love. Kneeling,
watching the hole, he tried to concentrate on Lee Strunk and the war, all the dangers, but his
love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and
breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at
once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness
in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone—riding her bike across campus or sitting
off by herself in the cafeteria. Even dancing, she danced alone—and it was the aloneness
that filled him with love. He remembered telling her that one evening. How she nodded and
looked away. And how, later, when he kissed her. She received the kiss without returning it,
her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.
Lieutenant Cross gazed at the tunnel. But he was not there. He was buried with Martha
under the white sand at the Jersey shore. They were pressed together, and the pebble in his
mouth was her tongue. He was smiling. Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the day was; the
sullen paddies,26 yet he could not bring himself to worry about matters of security. He was
beyond that. He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn't help
it.
A few moments later Lee Strunk crawled out of the tunnel. He came up grinning, filthy but
alive. Lieutenant Cross nodded and closed his eyes while the others clapped Strunk on the
back and made jokes about rising from the dead.
Worms, Rat Kiley said. Right out of the grave. Fuckin' zombie.
The men laughed. They all felt great relief.
Spook city, said Mitchell Sanders.
Lee Strunk made a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very happy, and right then,
when Strunk made that high happy moaning sound, when he went Ahhooooo, right then Ted
Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open.
The teeth were broken. There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye. The cheekbone
was gone. Oh shit, Rat Kiley said, the guy's dead. The guy's dead, he kept saying, which
seemed profound—the guy's dead. I mean really.
The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition. Lieutenant Cross
carried his good-luck pebble. Dave Jensen carried a rabbit's foot. Norman Bowker,
otherwise a very gentle person, carried a thumb that had been presented to him as a gift by
Mitchell Sanders. The thumb was dark brown, rubbery to the touch, and weighed four
ounces at most. It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen. They'd found
him at the bottom of an irrigation ditch, badly burned, flies in his mouth and eyes. The boy
wore black shorts and sandals. At the time of his death he had been carrying a pouch of rice,
a rifle, and three magazines of ammunition.
You want my opinion, Mitchell Sanders said, there's a definite moral here.
He put his hand on the dead boy's wrist. He was quiet for a time, as if counting a pulse, then
he patted the stomach, almost affectionately, and used Kiowa's hunting hatchet to remove
the thumb.
Henry Dobbins asked what the moral was.
Moral?
You know. Moral.
Sanders wrapped the thumb in toilet paper and handed it across to Norman Bowker. There
was no blood. Smiling, he kicked the boy's head, watched the flies scatter, and said, It's like
with that old TV show—Paladin. Have gun, will travel.
Henry Dobbins thought about it.
Yeah, well, he finally said. I don't see no moral.
There it is, man.
Fuck off.
They carried USO27 stationery and pencils and pens. They carried Sterno, safety pins, trip
flares, signal flares, spools of wire, razor blades, chewing tobacco, liberated joss sticks and
statuettes of the sniffing Buddha, candles, grease pencils, The Stars and Stripes, fingernail
clippers, Psy Ops leaflets,28 bush hats, bolos, and much more. Twice a week, when the
resupply choppers came in, they carried hot chow in green mermite cans and large canvas
bags filled with iced beer and soda pop. They carried plastic water containers, each with a
two-gallon capacity. Mitchell Sanders carried a set of starched tiger fatigues for special
occasions. Henry Dobbins carried Black Flag insecticide. Dave Jensen carried empty
sandbags that could be filled at night for added protection. Lee Strunk carried tanning
lotion. Some things they carried in common. Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77
scrambler radio, which weighed thirty pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of
memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the
wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-
English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars29 and Purple Hearts,30 plastic cards
imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and
dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots
and molds. They carried the land itself. Vietnam, the place, the sod—a powdery orange-red
dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole
atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of
it, they carried gravity. They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire, at night
they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village,
without purpose, nothing won or lost. They marched for the sake of the march. They
plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and
bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies
and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one step and then the next and
then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war
was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a
kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human
sensibility. Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological. They had
no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look
for, nor caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels,
sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next
village, then other villages, where it would always be the same. They carried their own lives.
The pressures were enormous. In the heat of early afternoon, they would remove their
helmets and flak jackets, walking bare, which was dangerous but which helped ease the
strain. They would often discard things along the route of march. Purely for comfort, they
would throw away rations, blow their Claymores and grenades, no matter, because by
nightfall the resupply choppers would arrive with more of the same, then a day or two later
still more, fresh watermelons and crates of ammunition and sunglasses and woolen
sweaters—the resources were stunning—sparklers for the Fourth of July, colored eggs for
Easter. It was the great American war chest—the fruits of sciences, the smokestacks, the
canneries, the arsenals at Hartford, the Minnesota forests, the machine shops, the vast fields
of corn and wheat they carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and
shoulders—and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there
was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to
carry.
After the chopper took Lavender away, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross led his men into the village
of Than Khe. They burned everything. They shot chickens and dogs, they trashed the village
well, they called in artillery and watched the wreckage, then they marched for several hours
through the hot afternoon, and then at dusk, while Kiowa explained how Lavender died,
Lieutenant Cross found himself trembling.
He tried not to cry. With his entrenching tool, which weighed five pounds, he began digging
a hole in the earth.
He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a
consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a
stone in his stomach for the rest of the war.
All he could do was dig. He used his entrenching tool like an ax, slashing, feeling both love
and hate, and then later, when it was full dark, he sat at the bottom of his foxhole and wept.
It went on for a long while. In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for
Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real,
and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin
and uninvolved, and because he realized she did not love him and never would.
Like cement, Kiowa whispered in the dark. I swear to God—boom—down. Not a word.
I've heard this, said Norman Bowker.
A pisser, you know? Still zipping himself up. Zapped while zipping.
All right, fine. That's enough.
Yeah, but you had to see it, the guy just
I heard, man. Cement. So why not shut the fuck up?
Kiowa shook his head sadly and glanced over at the hole where Lieutenant Jimmy Cross sat
watching the night. The air was thick and wet. A warm, dense fog had settled over the
paddies and there was the stillness that precedes rain.
After a time Kiowa sighed.
One thing for sure, he said. The lieutenant's in some deep hurt. I mean that crying jag—the
way he was carrying on—it wasn't fake or anything, it was real heavy-duty hurt. The man
cares.
Sure, Norman Bowker said.
Say what you want, the man does care.
We all got problems.
Not Lavender.
No, I guess not, Bowker said. Do me a favor, though.
Shut up?
That's a smart Indian. Shut up.
Shrugging, Kiowa pulled off his boots. He wanted to say more, just to lighten up his sleep,
but instead he opened his New Testament and arranged it beneath his head as a pillow. The
fog made things seem hollow and unattached. He tried not to think about Ted Lavender, but
then he was thinking how fast it was, no drama, down and dead, and how it was hard to feel
anything except surprise. It seemed unchristian. He wished he could find some great
sadness, or even anger, but the emotion wasn't there and he couldn't make it happen.
Mostly he felt pleased to be alive. He liked the smell of the New Testament under his cheek,
the leather and ink and paper and glue, whatever the chemicals were. He liked hearing the
sounds of night. Even his fatigue, it felt fine, the stiff muscles and the prickly awareness of
his own body, a floating feeling. He enjoyed not being dead. Lying there, Kiowa admired
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's capacity for grief. He wanted to share the man's pain, he wanted
to care as Jimmy Cross cared. And yet when he closed his eyes, all he could think was
Boom—down, and all he could feel was the pleasure of having his boots off and the fog
curling in around him and the damp soil and the Bible smells and the plush comfort of night.
After a moment Norman Bowker sat up in the dark.
What the hell, he said. You want to talk, talk. Tell it to me.
Forget it.
No, man, go on. One thing I hate, it's a silent Indian.
For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then,
however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn't.
When they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus
and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed
and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves
and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die. In different ways, it
happened to all of them. Afterward, when the firing ended, they would blink and peek up.
They would touch their bodies, feeling shame, then quickly hiding it. They would force
themselves to stand. As if in slow motion, frame by frame, the world would take on the old
logic—absolute silence, then the wind, then sunlight, then voices. It was the burden of being
alive. Awkwardly, the men would reassemble themselves, first in private, then in groups,
becoming soldiers again. They would repair the leaks in their eyes. They would check for
casualties, call in dust-offs, light cigarettes, try to smile, clear their throats and spit and
begin cleaning their weapons. After a time someone would shake his head and say, No lie, I
almost shit my pants, and someone else would laugh, which meant it was bad, yes, but the
guy had obviously not shit his pants, it wasn't that bad, and in any case nobody would ever
do such a thing and then go ahead and talk about it. They would squint into the dense,
oppressive sunlight. For a few moments, perhaps, they would fall silent, lighting a joint and
tracking its passage from man to man, inhaling, holding in the humiliation. Scary stuff, one of
them might say. But then someone else would grin or flick his eyebrows and say, Rogerdodger, almost cut me a new asshole, almost.
There were numerous such poses. Some carried themselves with a sort of wistful
resignation, others with pride or stiff soldierly discipline or good humor or macho zeal.
They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it.
They found jokes to tell.
They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased, they'd say. Offed, lit
up, zapped while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors and the war
came at them in 3-D. When someone died, it wasn't quite dying, because in a curious way it
seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with
tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst31 and destroy the reality
of death itself. They kicked corpses. They cut off thumbs. They talked grunt lingo. They told
stories about Ted Lavender's supply of tranquilizers, how the poor guy didn't feel a thing,
how incredibly tranquil he was.
There's a moral here, said Mitchell Sanders.
They were waiting for Lavender's chopper, smoking the dead man's dope.
The moral's pretty obvious, Sanders said, and winked. Stay away from drugs. No joke, they'll
ruin your day every time.
Cute, said Henry Dobbins.
Mind-blower, get it? Talk about wiggy—nothing left, just blood and brains.
They made themselves laugh.
There it is, they'd say, over and over, as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance
between crazy and almost crazy, knowing without going. There it is, which meant be cool,
let it ride, because oh yeah, man, you can't change what can't be changed, there it is, there it
absolutely and positively and fucking well is.
They were tough.
They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—
these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had
tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of
cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this
was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance
and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear,
which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.
It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of
glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of
embarrassment. They crawled into tunnels and walked point and advanced under fire. Each
morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move. They endured. They kept
humping. They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes
and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and
not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper
that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet
no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too
frightened to be cowards.
By and large they carried these things inside, maintaining the masks of composure. They
sneered at sick call. They spoke bitterly about guys who had found release by shooting off
their own toes or fingers. Pussies, they'd say. Candyasses. It was fierce, mocking talk, with
only a trace of envy or awe, but even so, the image played itself out behind their eyes.
They imagined the muzzle against flesh. They imagined the quick, sweet pain, then the
evacuation to Japan, then a hospital with warm beds and cute geisha nurses.
And they dreamed of freedom birds.
At night, on guard, staring into the dark, they were carried away by jumbo jets. They felt the
rush of takeoff Gone! they yelled. And then velocity—wings and engines—a smiling
stewardess—but it was more than a plane, it was a real bird, a big sleek silver bird with
feathers and talons and high screeching. They were flying. The weights fell off; there was
nothing to bear. They laughed and held on tight, feeling the cold slap of wind and altitude,
soaring, thinking It's over, I'm gone!—they were naked, they were light and free—it was all
lightness, bright and fast and buoyant, light as light, a helium buzz in the brain, a giddy
bubbling in the lungs as they were taken up over the clouds and the war, beyond duty,
beyond gravity and mortification and global entanglements—Sin loi!32 they yelled. I'm
sorry, motherfuckers, but I'm out of it, I'm goofed, I'm on a space cruise, I'm gone!—and it was
a restful, disencumbered sensation, just riding the light waves, sailing that big silver
freedom bird over the mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms and great
sleeping cities and cemeteries and highways and the golden arches of McDonald's. It was
flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the
earth and beyond the sun and through the vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens
and where everything weighed exactly nothing. Gone! they screamed, I'm sorry but I'm
gone!—and so at night, not quite dreaming, they gave themselves over to lightness, they
were carried, they were purely borne.
On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the
bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha's letters. Then he burned the two photographs.
There was a steady rain falling, which made it difficult, but he used heat tabs and Sterno to
build a small fire, screening it with his body, holding the photographs over the tight blue
flame with the tips of his fingers.
He realized it was only a gesture. Stupid, he thought. Sentimental, too, but mostly just
stupid.
Lavender was dead. You couldn't burn the blame.
Besides, the letters were in his head. And even now, without photographs, Lieutenant Cross
could see Martha playing volleyball in her white gym shorts and yellow T-shirt. He could see
her moving in the rain.
When the fire died out, Lieutenant Cross pulled his poncho over his shoulders and ate
breakfast from a can.
There was no great mystery, he decided.
In those burned letters Martha had never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care
of yourself. She wasn't involved. She signed the letters Love, but it wasn't love, and all the
fine lines and technicalities did not matter.
The morning came up wet and blurry. Everything seemed part of everything else, the fog
and Martha and the deepening rain.
It was a war, after all.
Half smiling, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross took out his maps. He shook his head hard, as if to
clear it, then bent forward and began planning the day's march. In ten minutes, or maybe
twenty, he would rouse the men and they would pack up and head west, where the maps
showed the country to be green and inviting. They would do what they had always done.
The rain might add some weight, but otherwise it would be one more day layered upon all
the other days.
He was realistic about it. There was that new hardness in his stomach.
No more fantasies, he told himself.
Henceforth, when he thought about Martha, it would be only to think that she belonged
elsewhere. He would shut down the daydreams. This was not Mount Sebastian, it was
another world, where there were no pretty poems or midterm exams, a place where men
died because of carelessness and gross stupidity. Kiowa was right. Boom—down, and you
were dead, never partly dead.
Briefly, in the rain, Lieutenant Cross saw Martha's gray eyes gazing back at him.
He understood.
It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they
had to do.
He almost nodded at her, but didn't.
Instead he went back to his maps. He was now determined to perform his duties firmly and
without negligence. It wouldn't help Lavender, he knew that, but from this point on he
would comport himself as a soldier. He would dispose of his good-luck pebble. Swallow it,
maybe, or use Lee Strunk's slingshot, or just drop it along the trail. On the march he would
impose strict field discipline. He would be careful to send out flank security, to prevent
straggling or bunching up, to keep his troops moving at the proper pace and at the proper
interval. He would insist on clean weapons. He would confiscate the remainder of
Lavender's dope. Later in the day, perhaps, he would call the men together and speak to
them plainly. He would accept the blame for what had happened to Ted Lavender. He would
be a man about it. He would look them in the eyes, keeping his chin level, and he would issue
the new SOPs in a calm, impersonal tone of voice, an officer's voice, leaving no room for
argument or discussion. Commencing immediately, he'd tell them, they would no longer
abandon equipment along the route of march. They would police up their acts. They would
get their shit together, and keep it together, and maintain it neatly and in good working
order.
He would not tolerate laxity. He would show strength, distancing himself.
Among the men there would be grumbling, of course, and maybe worse, because their days
would seem longer and their loads heavier, but Lieutenant Cross reminded himself that his
obligation was not to be loved but to lead. He would dispense with love; it was not now a
factor. And if anyone quarreled or complained, he would simply tighten his lips and arrange
his shoulders in the correct command posture. He might give a curt little nod. Or he might
not. He might just shrug and say Carry on, then they would saddle up and form into a
column and move out toward the villages west of Than Khe.
ENG125: Introduction to Literature
Proposal for final paper—Week 1
Once you have decided on an approved prompt and approved text,
respond to the questions below. Please be mindful of the word count
and double-space all of your responses. You are to meet the minimum
word requirement without going over the maximum number of words
requested.
1. What is your chosen prompt for the literary analysis assignment?
I choose to complete Prompt #3: Consider the role of setting, or
context, in one of the works.
2. What interests you most about this prompt and why?
After reading the stories, I realized that the setting is vital to any
literature work. In Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” the setting is in a
city, and it makes the story have the sense of a crowd. It is easy to
form a crowd in the city than countryside. How the authors place
the characters and the persona makes the work show the
conditions, the difficulties, and other elements of the background,
and this takes me as a reader out of reality into the virtual world.
At some point, the author can make me as a reader feel the
weather, for instance chills when he or she is describing cold.
These are the elements of setting that has driven to my proposal
topic selection.
3. What text will you write about? Why?
I am impressed by the setting in the story “The things they carried” by
Tim O’Brien. The personal is Lt. James Cross, and the setting is mainly a
harsh battle field that has pushed them to carry a lot in terms of foods
and ammunitions. It is a setting that breaks human beings emotionally. I
will be writing about the uncertain and frightening setting and its
influence on the characters, with ore focus on Lt. James. I will also write
of the sorts of emotions the soldiers experience, and show how they cope
with the emotions with specific references from the text.
4. What is your working thesis? Keep in mind that “working thesis” means
you can slightly modify your thesis for the draft and/or final essay.
ENG125: Introduction to Literature
In the story “The things they carried” the person and other characters are
faced by hardships due to the battlefield setting embraced by the author.
This causes fear, anger and other extreme emotions, strong enough to
cause trauma.
5. What are three key ideas that you will discuss in support of your
thesis? The description of the things they carried show the need for
protection and fear of the conditions they were to meet.
a. I will use the nights’ setting and the tension, at points
when they were talking less and protecting one another in the battle field.
6. I will also discuss the deeper emotions that were caused by the
difficulties, and how they coped.
7. What questions/concerns do you have at this point about your project?
This topic leaves me wondering what the battle field setting was meant to
achieve to the reader. At some point I think it is supposed to make a
reader respect militants. Again, the reader could be appealing to the
military commanders to protect militants, and offer them psychological
support, because what they go through in the battle field is holistic.
Could it also be meant to prepare aspiring militants psychologically? Is
the setting exaggerated for literature purposes?
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